As fellow child stars, Demi Lovato and Keke Palmer have a lot in common — but not all of those similarities are positive.
While guesting on an episode of Baby, It’s Keke Palmer posted Tuesday (March 3), the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon alumni bonded over the obstacles they both faced as teens in the entertainment industry. One of them was feeling out of place with other teenagers, because few others could relate to working adult hours, something that led them to seeking connections with people who were too old for them.
“I’m 15, why was my boyfriend 20?” Palmer recalled. “We was trying to find outlets, though, and a way to process this.”
“Why was my boyfriend 30?” Lovato replied, leaving the ‘Burbs star shocked. “Nobody our age could understand. But then you look back in hindsight — when I turned 30, I was like, ‘That’s not OK.’”
Both ladies have been open about the same subject in the past, with the Camp Rock actress writing the 2022 track “29” about turning the age her ex-boyfriend was at the time they started dating. Most fans believe the song is about actor Wilmer Valderrama, who started dating Lovato when he was about 30 years old and the singer had just turned 18.
“The moment when you realize, and you get to the age of a lot of people that were around you and doing stuff, it’s almost a mental break that can happen,” Palmer said to Lovato. “Because you realize, ‘You were taking advantage of me.’ ‘Oh, I was being exploited.’ At 15, I’m thinking, ‘My boyfriend’s older, because I’m doing an older job … This is the way it is.’ It seemed normal in my mind.”
“I love the Hilary Duff song that she came out with,” added the Nope star — who will serve as this year’s Billboard Women in Music host — to which Lovato emphatically agreed. “It’s like, ‘Oh, sh–, we all had the same damn life.’ People kept telling us, ‘You’re so mature for your age!’”
The song in question, “Mature,” appears on Duff’s new album, Luck … or Something, which dropped at the end of February and recently debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. The Lizzie McGuire actress addressed the track’s subject matter in an interview with Glamour, saying at the time, “It’s definitely about a relationship that I had … with someone older than me, and that was not illegal, but inappropriate when you have this much time removed from it.”
“I think that it’s super nuanced, and it’s hard to defend certain things that have happened in my life,” Duff added at the time. “But the one thing that I’ll say is, working as an adult since I was 10 years old, it’s very hard to have relationships with people your own age.”
Lovato is now married to songwriter Jordan “Jutes” Lutes, tying the knot in May. The pair collaborated on the vocalist’s latest album, It’s Not That Deep, which dropped in October, debuting at No. 9 on the U.S. albums chart.
Watch Lovato’s full interview on Baby, This Is Keke Palmer above.
